Friday, June 20, 2014

I Am Paranoid About the Future

A Potential Death Sentence for Humanity

The more I think about the consequences of artificial intelligence, the more I tremble with fear and apprehension. No, I'm not worried about some mythological sci-fi scenario in which robots rebel against their owners and wipe out humanity. That's just nonsense coming from the Singularity movement. Those who hold those views are clueless as to the true nature of intelligence. They are lost in a lost world.

I am paranoid because I understand the power of intelligence, artificial or otherwise. Any government, organization or individual who manages to control artificial intelligence will have the power to turn our beautiful planet into hell. The introduction of true AI into this world, as it currently is, with all its wars, corruption, crime and countless other horrors, would be a death sentence for humanity. I have seen the enemy and he is not a machine. He is us.

4 comments:

I have been reading you're blog for a while now and I have really enjoyed reading you're posts. You're polemics regarding spacetime physics have been very enlightening. I was hoping you could answer the following questions I have been wondering about:

1. What will you do with project COSA once it is finished? Will this turn in to some kind of startup? Will you make it open source?

2. Will the COSA programming environment make possible the kind of strong AI you're talking about in this post?

John, thanks for the comment. I believe we can have strong AI with current computer technology but human-level AI would require tens of thousands of processors. COSA will certainly be perfect for AI because I anticipate that COSA hardware will be orders of magnitude faster than current computers. Also, the fact that COSA is inherently parallel makes it an ideal platform for any kind of neural networks.

The software side of COSA will probably be open source. But a COSA processor, which is what will be needed if COSA is to be successful, is a different matter. The COSA model makes it possible to design a completely different type of computer architecture. The biggest problem in computer science today is the memory bandwidth problem, aka the Von Neumann bottleneck. I believe the COSA model can provide a solution to this problem.

Let me add that COSA is dear to me and I will not abandon it. I will get back to it as soon as I can raise adequate funds from my AI work.

Good to know, thanks. I feel you're pain regarding the singularity people btw. The problem is that people confuse intelligence with consciousness. This is because people are mistakenly taught that science has all the answers, which makes it possible for college educated adults to believe that human-level awareness is the result of the proper arrangement of signal-based biological computing elements-a misconception that should easily be cleared up by a 100 level philosophy class. And they say us religious folks believe in magic…

I was hoping that I could ask you one more question. You’re blog has gotten me interested in artificial intelligence. I am considering going back to school to get a computer science degree in order to get involved with AI research. I am 27 years old, and it would take me three years to get my degree. All things considered (including the fact that I will have to waste time learning crackpotery like algorithmic programming), do you recommend I go back to school? Would it be worth it?

You're absolutely correct about the blatant nonsense about consciousness that's so prevalent in AI circles. Materialists are the most clueless and superstitious of all the religious groups, IMO. It's kind of ironic since they accuse the other religions of being clueless. But this is to be expected in this world.

I don't think you need to go back to school to get a computer science degree in order to get involved in AI research. The AI community's emphasis on math as the answer to AI shows that they, too, are clueless.

I suggest you go through a tutorial on C# or Java. Learn the basics: loops, data types, strings, structures, containers, conditionals, classes, methods, etc. There is no need to learn statistics or any kind of fancy math because the brain does not use it. The brain uses a simple winner-take-all approach to deal with uncertainty. Simple everyday arithmetic will do.

By the way, Rebel Speech is written in C# for Windows. I plan to release both the executable and the source code when the time comes.